Reaction Time in the Quarterly Essay
Today we’ve got a guest post from Wendy Palmer, who you might recognise from her comments on earlier posts here. Wendy is a fiction writer with an interest in environmental issues. She’s written a review for us of the Ian Lowe essay I mentioned yesterday.
Reaction time: climate change and the nuclear option. Ian Lowe. Quarterly Essay 27; Melbourne, Black, Inc.Over the last year or so, the ‘nuclear power option’ has been touted as a viable solution for cutting carbon emissions and countering climate change. The publicity has been such that even some trenchant anti-nuclear people are considering nuclear power as the lesser of two evils. But can nuclear energy really solve our growing climate change and energy supply issues?In his wide-ranging essay, Lowe goes through five reasons why nuclear energy is not the solution:
- Economically, nuclear power would cost more than alternative energy producers (as well as more than conventional coal): one estimate is $75-105 per megawatt hour; only solar has the potential to cost as much at $70-$120 per megawatt hour, while wind and gas are much cheaper
- Nuclear power is too slow a response to cut carbon emissions: realistically it could take up to ten or fifteen years to build one nuclear power station in Australia, then another five years to make up for the construction and fuelling energy costs; this means it would be fifteen to twenty years for it to even start making a contribution to cutting carbon pollution. Compare that to fifteen to twenty months for introducing large-scale renewable energy production
- Nuclear power is not carbon-free: it takes a lot of fossil fuels to mine and process the ores, enrich the fuel and build the stations. Obviously the same argument applies to building renewable energy grids, but arguably they are less intensive in this regard
- Just like oil, uranium ores are a limited resource: the high-grade ores are limited and could only supply present demand for fifty years (ten years, if we increase demand to replace all coal-powered station). Then we have to use the lower-grade ores, which would require so much extra energy for extraction and processing that they could release more carbon dioxide than burning gas
- Nuclear power is dangerous: both in terms of the risk of accidents and the risk of terrorism or proliferation. The management of the radioactive waste is another major issue here, both morally (we export the ore; should we take back the waste?) and technically. These are the concerns which make many people anti-nuclear; it’s the other four issues that should make us re-consider whether it is, indeed, the lesser evil.
The whole essay makes for fascinating reading. Lowe covers some of the politics of nuclear energy and evaluates (and eviscerates) the Howard government taskforce report, Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia?, showing how much of its ‘positive’ endorsement for the nuclear power option is pure spin.
Lowe also spends time dispelling some of more entrenched myths about renewables: that they can’t handle baseload, that they’re expensive and will cost jobs, that they can’t be scaled up etc. In fact, the record of alternatives is pretty good both economically-speaking (job creation, for starters) and performance-wise, especially given the comparative lack of research funding.
Compared to the practicalities of nuclear power stations – where will we build them if for maximum effectiveness they should be near the demand (ie near population centres) and on the coast (for cooling water)? What will we do with the waste? How are developing nations going to handle these issues? – renewables look easy.
Lowe’s underpinning argument is simple: those touting nuclear energy as the solution are looking for a technical fix that would allow the western world to maintain its current, incredibly wasteful, lifestyle. On the other hand, alternative energies can be brought on board much faster than nuclear power and can handle our energy needs if we also become more energy-efficient – which doesn’t take a huge sacrifice on our part.
Tags: essay, nuclear power
March 19th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
It would be good if renewable energy sources were capable of replacing conventional sources of fossil energy, as Ian Lowe suggests they should, in his essay “Reaction time: climate change and the nuclear option”. but it seems increasingly unlikely they are never going to be able to contribute more than a small percentage of our needs.
Even if it were 20%, which we probably will not see any time soon in Australia, we would still be guilty of neglecting the way that the other 80% of our energy is generated if we concentrated solely on the renewable question. In every country in the world the stark choice is between fossil fuels, usually coal, and nuclear power. Usually the nuclear option is rejected out of hand. Ian Lowe’s comments are a good example:
“The nuclear option does not make sense on any level: economically, environmentally, politically or socially. It is too costly, too dangerous, too slow and has too small an impact on global warming.”
I would point to the French experience of nuclear power as a counter argument to all of these points. The French generate close to 80% of their electricity from nuclear power and it has had no discernable political or social cost. Economically, the French have their problems like many other European countries, but the they haven’t been caused by high electricity prices. If French nuclear electricity were really too costly, why are Germany, the UK and others buying as much electricity as the French can physically supply?
Too dangerous? All the evidence is that when nuclear power stations are properly designed, and operated correctly, the nuclear option is the safer of the alternatives. Coal has to be mined and that is where the real danger is. However if cheap shots were allowed, it could be pointed out that coal -fired stations emit more radioactivity too.
Too slow? Having decided that they are going to follow the nuclear path, the French do seem to just get on with it all without too much fuss.
Environmentally and on Global Warming? Far from making ‘no sense’, nuclear power stations do make the most sense on these issues. They are orders of magnitude cleaner than coal fired power stations and their CO2 emissions are on a par with the renewables like solar and wind. The French figures for per capita emission of CO2, even though they are a big electricity exporter, are less than half of those for the UK and Germany and less than a quarter of those for the USA, Canada and Australia.
Uranium ores may be a limited resource like any other metal ore, but add in Thorium ores, the recovery of Uranium from sea water, the development of fast breeder reactors should the price of Uranium ore necessitate their use, and the supply situation for all nuclear fuels is a lot rosier that Ian Lowe might care to admit.
After Chernobyl, it has been easy to be critical of nuclear power. That type of accident must never be allowed to happen again. It is slightly more difficult to suggest an alternative which doesn’t involve either condemning the planet to environmentally disastrous global warming or completely shutting down the world economy.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Hi Peter, thanks for your comment. I imagine Julie will be along shortly to respond also.
You say: “In every country in the world the stark choice is between fossil fuels, usually coal, and nuclear power”. The point of Lowe’s essay is to try to establish that we do have other choices and that we shouldn’t be railroaded into a decision by pro-nuclear lobbyists, who have seen their opportunity and are promoting nuclear power as the solution to our global warming issues.
France decided on the nuclear route over thirty years ago. Arguably, we no longer have thirty years to get ourselves into their position: it is not the quick-fix solution many people seem to be looking for.
Of course alternative energy cannot cover all of our current energy demand. Lowe’s argument is that each of us have a personal responsibility to reduce how much energy we use instead of jumping into ways to maintain what can only be called a wasteful way of life.
As to the safety issue, it’s a little glib to say things like if they’re properly designed and operated they’re safe (also, safer than what alternatives, exactly?). The consequences of when they are not properly designed and operated are rather dramatic and guarantees given by private companies with their eye on their profit margin have not proven in the past to be particularly robust.
I have no particular dog in this fight: I found Lowe’s reasoning persuasive but I wouldn’t be heartbroken if we built a nuclear power plant in Australia. I do think alternative energy solutions deserve the same level of government support, research funding and subsidies as the nuclear industry before they can be dismissed out of hand.
March 21st, 2008 at 11:16 am
I really have to question some of your claims, Peter.
You say that renewables are “increasingly unlikely” to replace conventional power sources. This isn’t true. Dr Mark Diesendorf and others have shown that Australia could transition to using mostly renewables, without waiting for any new technology, only using existing methods. He also addresses the base-load fallacy. His plan, or something like it, could be put into place this year.
I completely agree with you on the problems with coal. Coal mining is dangerous and polluting; but so is uranium mining, so what’s the benefit in switching one for the other? As for nuclear plants producing CO2 on a level with solar and wind, that’s only true if you don’t include the whole process (mining and transporting uranium; building and running the plants; transporting and storing the waste, since we have no disposal methods). Nuclear plants are less efficient than coal plants, needing more water-cooling - Australia doesn’t have any water to spare. But none of this matters: nuclear doesn’t have to compete with coal, because we already know that we can’t keep using coal. Nuclear has to compete with renewables.
Your French example isn’t relevant: they started their nuclear power in 1973. It’s cheap and quick now because most of the costs and time are in the start-up phase, which for them was 35 years ago. It’s hardly comparable to the costs Australia would face in 2008, without having any existing industry at all, and taking a decade to get one plant up and running. France does have low CO2 emissions per capita, which is great - but that’s a total amount for all the nation’s activities, rather than from just their electricity generation, so it’s not relevant either.
You say that properly designed nuclear power plants are safe, and they do have an ok record. But how do you design away human error? People still have to run these power plants, same as any other job; still have to guard them against bored teenagers and serious terrorist efforts; they’ll still be owned by corporations whose first duty is to make a profit, and we’ve all seen what big business will do for a quick buck.
You mention the pipe-dreams of thorium and fast-breeder reactors and seawater extraction as improvements on the nuclear deal. They may become a reality, but not fast enough for us. Uranium is non-renewable - why should we spend huge amounts of money on it just to have it run out?
Finally, you make the alarmist prediction that if we don’t choose nuclear to solve our environmental problems, we’ll be “completely shutting down the world economy”. How can you make that claim? The world economy does not depend on coal, nor will it depend on nuclear (you could make a case for oil, but transport is a whole other can of worms). Choosing renewables is not going to doom us all - in fact, it’s an opportunity to rethink the way we organise and distribute electricity. I guess that’s what scares some people.
The sun and the wind aren’t stopping anytime soon. It takes 2 years to build solar and wind facilities, compared to 10 years for a fast-tracked nuclear plant. We need electricity solutions now, not in a decade’s time. The nuclear industry has been making promises for 50 years, and has barely begun to deliver on them. I don’t want to spend taxpayers’ money on a dead-end, when there are better options already available.
March 24th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Julie,
Thank you for the Mark Diesendorf link. There cannot be any argument in principle with Mark’s aims and objectives. I’d just raise the following points.
Global warming is a problem requiring a global solution rather than from one’s own immediate nationalist perspective. The ‘Base load fallacy argument’, if the analysis is correct, can only apply to countries like Australia which have low population densities. As Mark himself acknowledges, “…there is one constraint on a renewable electricity future. Growth in demand has to be levelled off, or eventually there will not be enough land for wind and bioenergy. In the long run, stabilisation of demand will entail a change in the national economic structure and the stabilisation of Australia’s population.”
There is an element of Malthusianism to this argument. Even if the argument for the desirability of a stabilisation of world population is accepted, how do we, as liberal minded or even left leaning, westerners, go about promoting it? We can’t very well issue a decree that all developing nations should follow China’s one child policy. Even if the world population were somehow stabilised in the next few years, there are literally still billions of people who are working and aspiring to the same levels of lifestyle as Australians and the citizens of other wealthy countries currently enjoy.
There are no easy options. However, there are some options, besides the question of nuclear power, which we should be especially wary of. Of these, I would put biomass or biofuels at the top of the list. The primary responsibility of world agriculture should be to produce food for the world’s population rather than bio-fuels for the transportation of the wealthy. The recent sharp world price increase of corn, or maize, is largely attributable to the diversion of large quantities of the crop for bio-fuel production. Also, there is little point promoting bio-fuels if large expanses of rainforest are cut down to enable the cultivation of palm oils and other bio fuel crops, which currently are in high demand.
I should say that I am not totally comfortable promoting the idea of nuclear energy and I have no connection with the industry at all. Although, as a much younger person, in the early 70s, fresh out of Uni in the Uk with a Physics degree it was an option I seriously considered. However, at the time, I considered that the motivation, indeed the reason for the existence of the industry, was the production of fissile grade materials for use in nuclear weapons, so I declined to become involved. The French nuclear industry was no different, and I would say that the French have taken the correct path but for totally the wrong reasons! Thirty years ago the problem of CO2 emissions was much less well understood. That they are now well understood makes all the difference to the balance of the arguments for and against nuclear power. Civil nuclear power is now being used for what its proponents always claimed. Rather than producing fissile materials, fissile material from obsolete nuclear stockpiles is being consumed in the most cost effective manner.
The question of the non-renewability of Uranium fuel is, I believe a disingenuous argument. If we accept the argument for not using Uranium as we find it, we should apply the same argument to all other metals. There is a less secure supply of most metals, such as copper, than there is for Uranium. We only have around 30 years known supply of copper at the current rate of production. However, 30 years ago, when the rate of consumption was half of what it is now, we still had the same ‘30 years of supply at the current rate of consumption’. If the nuclear industry is confident that they have enough Uranium, they should be allowed to accept the risk that they may be wrong. If the situation for Uranium does turn out to be different from copper, we can be pretty sure that human ingenuity will be find a way around the problem, probably in the development of thorium nuclear fuels. Arguably, the main reason for the lag of thorium based nuclear technology is because of its lesser suitability to the production of weapons grade fissile materials.
I am not sure why you think nuclear reactors are less efficient than coal fired stations. Both efficiencies are determined by the same laws of thermodynamics so there is no reason to expect there to be much difference on a heat produced to usable power generated ratio. Yes, we should factor in the costs, both financial and environmental, of building nuclear reactors but equally the same considerations should apply to solar cells and wind generators. They don’t come for free either. Solar cells, in particular, contain chemicals and heavy metals, which should be treated as hazardous chemical waste at the end of their lifetime but will probably just end up in landfills the world over.
I’m quite puzzled by your airy remark that the French example is ‘not relevant’. French people are no more, and arguable less, environmentally aware than, say, the Germans. They don’t drive smaller cars, take fewer trips or cycle more. From my observations, they don’t pay as much attention to recycling waste household items. More to the point they have many fewer wind turbines and solar generators. And yet, their CO2 emission figures are twice as good. It is really quite undeniable that the use of nuclear power in the French electricity generation system is the reason for the difference.
Accepting that nuclear power is the best answer to the global CO2 problem is not an easy process. However, the green movement should look again at the issue using reason and rationality rather than emotion. Let us do our own research into the costs of all kinds, economic, human, environmental, of coal versus the nuclear option. Rather than totally opposing the nuclear industry we should be looking over their shoulder every step of the way to ensure that the safest possible practices are observed.
March 25th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Diesendorf’s was giving an Australian plan in his book, not a one-size-fits-all solution. And Australians don’t have a lot of influence worldwide; we have to work out our own problems before we presume to solve anyone else’s.
Population growth and the necessity of equitable solutions for people in developing nations are priority issues (see Greenhouse Development Rights at Worldchanging). But nuclear power doesn’t solve them, it just postpones the day when we have to deal with them. I agree with you about the problems with biofuels, though. In Queensland, sugarcane waste can be used without diverting resources from food production, but I wouldn’t want to extend our investment in it to the point of causing more problems than we solve.
re: copper, we don’t have to start an industry for it from scratch, we can re-use it without excessive processing, it has many purposes instead of just three, it doesn’t create radioactive waste, and it’s not a potential candidate for providing electricity - it’s not a close comparison. Human ingenuity might solve the non-renewability problem that the nuclear industry has been tackling for so long, but how much longer do we give it before we move on?
I believe I got the efficiency of nuclear power plants info from Cosmos last year, an inputs vs outputs ratio to do with heat loss from design - I’ll have to find it again. But again, nuclear power needs to compete with renewables, not coal. We already have methods for dealing with renewables’ chemical and heavy metal waste (also: smaller quantity than nuclear waste). Our only solution so far for nuclear waste has been to store it for later generations to figure out.
France’s nuclear industry is just so old; their decision was made and implemented 35 years ago. Our costs and time taken would be so much different we can’t use them as a model for our own solution. And you’ll notice that other countries aren’t rushing to copy them, either.
re: being anti-nuclear power based on emotion, rather than reason… that’s a common claim from the nuclear industry, but it doesn’t hold up. It’s a reversal of the truth: nuclear power is such an easy concept to grasp (uranium is the new coal!), and doesn’t require any re-thinking of our assumptions, or effort on the part of communities or governments, so it becomes the default answer when we’re too lazy to think through the alternatives. But the long-term consequences (waste storage; non-renewable) of nuclear power are real, and the cost and time it takes to build just one plant are real. The nuclear industry might surprise me and solve these in the next 2 or 3 years, but otherwise, it’s just not good enough.
For me, it always comes back to this: we have less than a decade to drastically reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, and it takes a decade to get a nuclear power plant up and running. And I’m being generous here by assuming we could fast-track one; the usual timeframe is 15 years. It’s just too slow. I’m the pragmatic type: I want to start work on cheap and quick implementation that will cut our coal-driven emissions right now, not a decades-long plan that needs to be re-done when the resources run out. I’m assuming our government won’t throw unlimited resources at the problem, so I’ll continue to lobby for renewables to be given preference.
March 25th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Julie,
Well OK, leaving the nuclear issue aside for now, if you’d like to barrack for another renewable energy source which is capable of generating electricity for the base load, you might like to consider geothermal. Geothermal energy, which has much more potential than is generally realised, runs on the heat of hot rocks. Areas of high seismic activity such as are found in Iceland and New Zealand are often good locations where it isn’t necessary to drill very deeply to reach the hot inner core of the earth. In other regions, rocks can be hot due to naturally occurring nuclear reactions.In Australia, there are suitable geothermal sites in SA and WA.
Wind and solar, although technically well developed, are more problematic. However, if we had a means of storing energy economically, in an electrical battery, it would make an enormous difference. I would suggest sodium/sulphur or sodium/salt batteries as the best prospects. The development of economical energy storage may not seem to be a green priority, at first glance, but I’d say it certainly should be.
If only we could persuade the government to not waste so much of their money, such as on military helicopters which don’t even provide a single day’s service, and instead properly fund these two projects, your wishes for renewable energy could start to be realised
March 26th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Excellent: common ground! I’ve heard a lot about the potential of geothermal energy, and would love to see more information about it in green circles. I generally don’t bring it up because I’m not full bottle on the subject, but I’ve heard it could be a goer for some Aussie regions, which I think is fascinating. I’m seeing some work on batteries for wind/solar, and battery alternatives, although nothing market-ready yet. I’ll have to put together a post about it.
And the wastefulness of military spending is particularly annoying when there’s so many more interesting things to work on!
April 8th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Julie and Wendy,
Just following on from my last post , in which I mentioned the importance of batteries for green energy storage systems I’ve found this link:
http://www.solartaxi.com/technology/zebra-battery/ which looks very promising.
This battery is being used to power an electric car on a round the world trip to demonstrate the possibilities for CO2 free travel.
They have already completed their Australian part of their trip.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
That looks really interesting, thanks!